What’s all the fuss about “Planet of the humans”?
Is Michael Moore’s new documentary flawed? Yes. Should you watch it anyway? Absolutely!
Michael Moore publicly released his new documentary “Planet of the humans” on April 21st to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. Within hours the internet had gone into melt-down, and over the following days organization after organization began denouncing the piece — which is not unusual for the polarizing director and producer of films such as Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11. But this time it wasn’t the bankers, corporations or conservative politicians denouncing his work — it was the environmental movement.
“Sadly bogus”, “lazy” and “Not just bad but old bad” were just some of the criticisms leveled at Moore and director Jeff Gibbs, whose film claims that green energy is anything but green and that environmental leaders have lost their way and sold out to corporate interests. The Guardian reported that the film is “dangerous, misleading and destructive” according to an assortment of climate scientists and environmental campaigners and “should be removed from public viewing”.
Could Moore, the man who in July 2016 correctly predicted Donald Trump would beat Hilary Clinton to the Whitehouse, really be so wrong? Could this doyen of the left famous for his attacks on capitalism and all that’s wrong with America really produce a documentary “selling far-right, climate-denier myths from nearly a decade ago to left-wing environmentalists in the 2020s”?
Well yes. And no.
And that’s the problem. For Moore, and for all of us. Because this film, rightly criticized by the renewable energy industry for some significant flaws, nonetheless has some incredibly important messages at it’s core. But what could have been, and may yet still prove to be, the most significant film about the environment since An Inconvenient Truth, is at risk of failing because Gibbs, who started work on the film over a decade ago, didn’t update significant slabs of his material.
What’s wrong with it?
The film is, to put it crudely, a reverse shit sandwich. Or a reverse shit ‘club’ sandwich if you can imagine such a thing — because while it makes some really important points at times, they are squeezed between thick layers of some pretty questionable material.
The first point the film tries to make is that the renewable energy industry isn’t anywhere near as ‘clean and green’ as the public has been led to believe, and is in fact just business as usual. Gibbs narrates:
“It was becoming clear that what we have been calling green, renewable energy and industrial civilisation are one and the same. Desperate measures not to save the planet, but to save our way of life. Desperate measures, rather than face the reality [that] humans are experiencing the planet’s limits all at once.”
This is a really important statement that I believe accurately captures much of the thinking driving the renewable energy industry. Focusing mostly on the solar and biomass sectors, the film points out the dirty, non-renewable, environmentally destructive industrial practices that go in to the construction of these technologies (solar and wind), or that subsidize their operation (biomass), and the fact that many of the same corporate actors we know and hate from the fossil fuel industry are behind the renewable energy industry. These are all valid points, and need to be made known to “consumers” [sic] who may otherwise be duped by the greenwash and spin of slick corporate PR campaigns. But Moore and Gibbs do themselves — and us — no favors by the way they go about it.
The entire first 45 minutes of the film is a largely outdated, inaccurate and somewhat misleading ‘expose’ of the solar energy industry. And it is this material that is most deserving of the fierce criticism levied by the renewables sector. The footage is old, the examples are dated, and some of the arguments are now irrelevant to an industry that is very different in 2020 to what it was in the period 2010–2012 when most of the material for the film seems to have been collected. The coverage of the biomass energy industry in a later part of the film has the same whiff of dated-and-misleading-manure about it (although to date I haven’t seen a scientifically rigorous rebuttal of the material presented there, or evidence that that the sector has evolved significantly since it was collected).
The second point the film tries to make is that “environmental leaders have lost their way and sold out to corporate interests” (quoting from the film’s Press Release). By “environmental leaders” they really mean individuals like Bill McKibben and Al Gore, and organisations like 350.org and the Sierra Club. By “lost their way” they mean supporting the less than ideal renewable energy industries discussed above. And by “sold out” they mean accepting corporate donations and sponsorship. It’s a broad and damning accusation supported by fairly slim evidence of some corporate sponsorship of selected individuals and organisations. The point is somewhat philosophical, reflecting differences of opinion within the environmental movement on how best to achieve the change we need, and is highly conflated with the “green industry” issue above.
Has the environmental movement failed to curb the environmental destruction caused by capitalism? Absolutely. Does this mean the environmental movement has sold out and is in bed with the corporations? Not at all. In a game where the rules are strongly stacked in favor of one side, its hardly surprising that that side is smashing the opposition, or that they are using every trick in their play book to take advantage of the situation. It’s the rules we should be focused on here, not the fact that some members of the losing team wear the logos of the rule-makers. The root issue here is failed public governance, not corporate sponsorship of environmental groups (as problematic as that may be). The treatment of the issue in the film isn’t very nuanced — or fair to most of the players — and the screen time might have been better invested had it been spent on the underlying problem rather than the apparent hypocrisy of some key players.
What’s right with it?
Despite these flaws, the film does have an important albeit unpalatable message at its core. And it’s a message that [still] desperately needs to be heard and, more importantly faced by us all. As Richard Heinberg, author of The End of Growth puts it 46 minutes in:
“There are too many human beings using too much too fast.”
This point is rammed home by what I think is the most powerful graphic in the film — the simple chart of human population growth over the past 12 thousand years.
“It took modern humans tens of thousands of years to reach a population of 700 million. And then we tapped into millions of years of stored energy, known as fossil fuels. Our human population exploded. It increased by ten times in a mere 200 years.
Our consumption has also exploded. On average, ten times per person, and many times more in the western world. You put the two together, the result is a total human impact 100 times greater than only 200 years ago.
And that is the most terrifying realization I have ever had. We humans are poised for a fall from an unimaginable height. Not because of one thing. Not climate change alone. But all the human-caused changes the planet is suffering from.”
It’s not a new story of course. Paul and Anne Erlich published The Population Bomb in 1968. But it’s a story we have been unwilling to hear, and are seemingly still unwilling to hear. In the film anthropologist Steven Churchill puts it this way:
“Species hit the population wall a lot — and then they crash. I mean that’s a common story in biology. If that happens to us, in a way, that’s the natural order of things. And I don’t think we’re gonna find a way out of this one. I don’t.”
[Jeff] “As a scientist what leads you to that conclusion?”
“Well because right now a large percentage of that number [of humans] is supported by industrial agriculture, which is heavily subsidized by oil. And it’s not sustainable. And, you know, there’s no going back. Without some sort of major die off in population there’s no turning back.”
Too many humans using too much too fast
In terms of screen time, this issue gets third billing in the film. But in terms of importance, to me its the key message and the core issue driving the previous two.
Why is it that we seem incapable of hearing this message, or if we do hear it seem to be incapable of doing anything about it?
The answer to the first part (too many humans) surely lies in our near universal view that human life is sacrosanct. The idea of deliberately controlling our population is so abhorrent to us that this option is never even on the table. With the notable exception of communist China, mandated restrictions on reproduction are considered an intolerable breach of human rights. And while many of us seem to accept the “necessity” of state sanctioned mass murder in disputes over territory or resources, the idea of intentionally culling humans outside of the theater of war is, ironically, anathema.
In the film Jeff and University of Montana ecologist Steven Running ask one another “Can a single species that’s come to dominate the entire planet be smart enough to limit it’s own presence? Is there any precedence for that in nature?” Curiously Running fails to think of any, but the answer is “yes”. And it’s us. Humans! Not only has modern day China consciously attempted to “limit it’s own presence” through its one-child policy, but voluntary birth control and pregnancy termination are widely practiced throughout the developed world, and historically many societies have practiced active population reduction (e.g. through infanticide) and passive birth control, particularly in non-agricultural societies. Population control is clearly something we are capable of. Nonetheless the subject remains taboo across most of the world. Given the graph above, it’s a taboo we need to urgently deal with!
With respect to the second part (using too much too fast) — it’s the economy stupid! We are partly unwilling and partly unable to tackle the absurd realities of our profit-driven growth-dependent economic system. In most of the world business and the pursuit of personal wealth are considered sacrosanct, consequences be damned. While the you-can’t-have-infinite-growth-on-a-finite-planet meme is now almost cliché, pretty much everybody sharing it is still actively participating in the infinite growth model. We know our lifestyles are a huge problem, but they’re just so darn comfortable we can’t quite bring ourselves to do anything meaningful about it. So we assuage our guilt with organic face creams and solar panels telling ourselves we’re doing what we can.
On this point Nina Jablonski, an Anthropologist at Penn State University makes an important observation:
“We have to have our abilities to consume reined in. Because we’re not good at reining them in if there are seemingly unrestrained resources.”
And this is the delusion of our current system — seemingly unrestrained resources. A society so drunk on the super-powers provided by fossil fuels that it consumes every year twice what the planet can actually sustain. A society so disconnected from its natural resource base that it hasn’t noticed that in barely two human generations it has consumed over 90% of the large fish in the oceans, lost 60% of its wild animals, 50% of its wetlands, 70% of its insects, and 30% of its agricultural land. Entire river systems across the globe no longer make it to the sea, and fully two thirds of our own human population already face restrictions on access to fresh water.
So here we are, caught between the ‘rock’ of population control and the ‘hard place’ of consumption control in a kind of suicidal stupor, consuming and over-populating ourselves to death.
While the movie offers little in the way of solutions to the many problems it highlights, let me close with this contribution from Sheldon Solomon, Social Psychologist at Skidmore College:
“If we’re going to make progress, whatever that word means, or even to persist as a form of life, we’re gonna need to radically overhaul our basic conception of who and what we are, and what it is we value. Because the people you referred to earlier — both on the left and on the right — that think we’re going to discover more oil, or solar panel ourselves into the future, where life will look pretty much like it does now — you know only cleaner and better — I think that’s just frankly delusional.
The only solution in principle is, as Albert Camus put it: ‘There’s only one liberty to come to terms with: death. Thereafter anything is possible.’ ”
